IFFS Play

Reflections on “America in One Room”. This talk is positioned at the intersectionof two literatures: partisan polarization and deliberative democracy. Itanalyzes results from a national field experiment in the US in which more than 500 registered voters were brought together to deliberate in depth over a longweekend on five major issues facing the country. A pre-post control group was also asked the same questions. The deliberators showed large, de-polarizing changes in their policy attitudes and large decreases in affective polarization. They also showed sustained effects on voting in the general election more than a year later (when compared to the voting of the control group). The paper develops the rationale for hypotheses explaining these dramatic changes and contrasts them with a literature which would have expected the opposite. The talk will briefly conclude with a discussion of plans and technology for scaling deliberation for large numbers beyond the random sample. James Fishkin is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy, Stanford University. This seminar is a part of the IFFS research seminar series and was recorded at IFFS on June 16 2021.